Slump in demand hits festive cheer in market
The Hindu
The slump has been attributed to households tightening purse strings due to rising costs
After a devastating second wave of COVID-19 when the government eased restrictions, traders were pinning their hopes on the festive season from Ganesha to Deepavali to recover losses. However, with the price of fuel and essential commodities spiralling, festival cheer remains elusive.
Many retailers across sectors said that consumption levels are down while others pointed out that it is not as high as they had hoped for. This is because households are tightening their purse strings due to rising costs and festivities are low key, they said.
Sajjan Raj Mehta, a cloth merchant in Chickpet, said business volume usually increases by over 150% during the festival season, but this year business levels were lower than usual, leave alone festival swell. “People do not have money in hand. We traders are marginally better off than during the lockdown,” he said.
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.
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